


Wars We Wage

by eveningstock (nightscentedstock)



Category: Away (TV 2020)
Genre: F/M, and hand holding only, and pining, hand holding, maybe some contemplation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:41:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26542360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightscentedstock/pseuds/eveningstock
Summary: Emma Green wages a war against herself, trying to remain proper and unaffected, and yet it is always her whose hand reaches for Ram in moments of despair.
Relationships: Emma Green/Ram Arya
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24





	Wars We Wage

The inevitability of getting too close begins when you first tell yourself not to get too close. It's not the first warning sign but the final point of no return for you have missed your cue to save yourself and now all you have left is a single strand of false hope. Control's lost when you need to remind yourself not to get close. It brings the message that your last fortified bastion has fallen.

The world may be yet to find out, but you have fallen from grace. 

It's a losing war she wages against herself, with just a dash of faith that she'd have the decency she's always known herself to have. But nothing is the same under the promise of two moons. Nothing is the same away from home when you launch yourself into the unknown.  


She fought countless battles against herself and lost in many a manner, only thinly veiling her weaknesses at times. But two times she lost the battle majestically, with her whole body turned against the inevitable, inviting the tragedy into their lives. 

  
  


**One.  
** Insanity is a slope and it is so easy to slide downwards once you lose footing. The despair and the relief mix together in a lethal cocktail, where she's too attached to her past life and too afraid of the new. Existing between two worlds — suspended in space between home that now feels like a distant dream, and the decade-long dream itself, now hitting her harder than any reality once she gets to live it.  


Then it is the first time she gives in to the tragedy as she reaches forward for a comforting grip, and feels his fingers curl against hers. The moment he rubs her hand in the gentlest manner, she feels icicles spreading over her chest, freezing her breath. Inside, she begs for it to mean nothing but knows that instead, it means everything.

Around them, there is complete silence, as they enjoy their stolen moments of intimacy from a world that should have never belonged to them.

She should have warned herself. But in a war you wage against yourself, you can only ever end up on the losing side.

Deep down she knows that she has already abandoned everything that is currently waiting for her return down there and that is why with every desperate attempt, she tries to attach herself to the last remnants of Earth. 

It's the guilt that makes her run in circles, trying to prove a tired point. An empty point, irrelevant this far away from home, flung into the emptiness and left to their own devices. No training can fully encompass the despair with which reality hits them once there is nothing that reminds them of home anymore. Once their connection to the world is severed. The chaos, and the finality of each choice that will hang on them for the rest of their lives, pulling them down with the weight of possible regret. 

No training can fully replicate the heaviness of reality. 

No training can build resilience against the betrayal that comes from within. 

Her hands reach out to grab his first. She is the one who’s asking for him wordlessly and not the other way around. If only it was the other way around, this could still be excused somehow.  


That fact in itself echoes in her chest like the first heartbeats of bittersweet betrayal, yielding herself to an unknown desire.  


A weakness that has never shown its face before — that crept on her so silently in these past two years that she was only there to notice the last warning, at the point of no return.

That point of no return that all with a pinch of morality will attempt to fight before slipping into the tragedy.

Ram's fingers slowly move away from hers as he retreats from her pod but his scent long remains in her nose for after, as preserved by his shirt. A pang of guilt mixing with the pleasure of wistfulness as she is drawn into a dreamless, healing sleep.

Her body may recover, but the craving in her chest that wishes to repeat that simple, innocent gesture, will never calm itself. 

  
  


**Two.  
** We wage our wars differently on a known battlefield. Here, out in the unknown, guilt will feast on her bones and break her down to smithereens until nothing but despair is left.

Then gone the despair in the vacuum of nothingness, something new may be born again, take its place.  


After the guilt and the second-guessing, the fighting and the denial there comes recklessness. Unaccounted seconds add up until they mean everything, seeping into their heart like poison that kills slowly.  


A moment she fights against it, in the next she reveals her secret for the whole world to see: She reaches for Ram’s hand on a live broadcast.  


Suddenly every little touch, every playful exchange, every shared moment, eye contact, silence, will mean much more than they ever believed. The drops of time fall backwards, rewriting their history, overriding all that happened with a more profound meaning they never expected to discover. A gesture so insignificant to the untrained eye, yet everything for those who know what to look for. 

In a moment of recklessness, Emma lays themselves bare before the world who’s watching on live television. Her husband, her daughter, and all their friends… 

She reveals an affair that has never been an affair — but some things only need to exist in a hidden corner in our chest to count as a betrayal. At that moment they bask in infinity and she has no other person in the whole world she’d rather have this experience with.  


Towards the surface of the Red Planet, they enter new territory, a set of rules they haven’t mastered yet, weaving a story that nobody other than the five of them will ever be able to comprehend. They agreed to disconnect from the rest of humanity and go forward onto a mission that may see them return as changed men. 

Landing is the most dangerous endeavour they have made yet, and it is with that understanding she seeks solace in the grip of someone else’s hand. It is with that understanding that she wants to be there for him, so he does not have to be alone anymore.  


The revelation, knowing that the world has now access to something so intimate, a moment of shared comfort, comes to her later. But there is no sense of regret, only the silence of togetherness that envelops them. 

It doesn’t always have to be a tearful tragedy. Sometimes betrayal is simple, quiet, and peaceful.  


She may have lost the war, but she lost it much earlier than today.  


**Author's Note:**

> Hope this made at least a little sense, I just really wanted to write something about them...


End file.
